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Airplanes of the Stars

Show performers talk about their favorite rides.

Art Scholl's Chipmunk (center, with the red and white stripes and the leading edges of the wings painted blue) hangs in the Boeing Aviation Hangar at the National Air and Space Museum's Steven F.Udvar-Hazy Center.
(Dane Penland)

By
Linda Shiner

airspacemag.com
April 30, 2008

When National Air and Space Museum docents tell visitors about the historic airplanes in the collection, they often draw on stories told by the people who know the airplanes best: the donors. Last year aeronautics curator Dorothy Cochrane invited airshow star Patty Wagstaff, performers Steve Oliver and Suzanne Asbury-Oliver, and Judy Scholl, wife of the late aerobatic showman Art Scholl, to give docents the inside scoop on three of the Museum's top-performing showplanes. Docents now have the following stories to add to their tours.

From This Story

Art Scholl's Chipmunk (center, with the red and white stripes and the leading edges of the wings painted blue) hangs in the Boeing Aviation Hangar at the National Air and Space Museum's Steven F.Udvar-Hazy Center.
(Dane Penland)

Suspended from the ceiling of the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia, Suzanne Asbury-Oliver’s historic Travel Air D4D Pepsi Skywriter presides over the other showplanes.
(NASM)

Patty Wagstaff in her Extra 260.
(Budd Davisson)

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Wagstaff said the first time she saw a photo of the Extra 260, which was installed in the Museum in 1994, she knew she had to have it. She was competing in the 1988 World Aerobatic Championships in Red Deer, Canada. "I'd never seen an airplane like it," she said. "It was sleek and fast-looking, but it was a prototype and Walter said it wasn't built to withstand the rigors of hard-core aerobatics."

When Extra sold the prototype a year later to Brian Becker, who ran Pompano Air Center in Florida, Wagstaff bought the airplane from him. "I flew it every day, every day, every day," she said, smiling, to the assembled group of docents.

I saw her fly the 260 once, at Andrews Air Force Base in June 1993, her last demonstration before retiring the airplane. I still remember the performance. It was so crisp, yet so exuberant. The airplane, which has a roll rate of 360 degrees a second, appeared to dance with itself. I could almost hear a little "ta-daaaa!" at the end of each precisely executed, rollicking combination of rolls and climbs and tumbles and dives. But by that time, said Wagstaff, "Things were starting to [break] on it."

"Walter was absolutely right," she said. "It was underbuilt [for aerobatics]." Wagstaff had broken a longeron at an airshow in 1992, and when Museum staff took the airplane apart to hang it in 1994, they had a hard time getting the wing off because the spar bolts holding the wing on were bent.

"The 260 was so fast and had such a clean frontal area that it was really easy to over-G it," she said. "That's why it was breaking." The G meter on the aircraft, which is on display in the Pioneers of Flight gallery on the second floor of the Museum in Washington, is still set at 12 Gs, the last mark Wagstaff hit that day at Andrews.

Suspended from the ceiling of the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia since the Center opened in 2003, Suzanne Asbury-Oliver's historic Travel Air D4D Pepsi Skywriter presides over the other showplanes. "I like seeing it way up high, looking down on everybody else, because that's where we did our work—up around 10,000 feet," Oliver told the docents. The "we" refers to her and the airplane, and the work: one of the rarest occupations in the world. "How many skywriters are there today?" an audience member asked. "You're looking at 'em," Oliver answered.

The world's last skywriter got her start by answering a 1980 advertisement in the publication Trade-a-Plane and trying out from the back seat of a Piper Super Cub. "What can you see?" Pepsi's chief pilot at the time, Jack Strayer, asked her from the front seat as they sat on the runway. Strayer knew that what Oliver was seeing from the backseat would be about what she'd see when skywriting in a TravelAir: not much. She wouldn't be able to see the letters she would be expected to write; rather she'd have to feel and calculate, almost like flying blind. "Nothing," she answered. "Good," said Strayer. "Let's go."

"I guess I did alright because he hired me," Oliver told the docents. "I was 21 when I started flying [the Travel Air]," she said, "and we sort of grew up together."